Lately, I’ve been receiving all kinds of anxious messages. Brothers and sisters, one after another, spirits sinking low. Either the career path looks unclear, or the road ahead feels rough and uncertain.
Because I move through a wide range of circles and encounter people at many different levels of life, I have some honest thoughts I’d like to share with you.
1 — Much of your anxiety comes from blind comparison.
Many things are difficult simply because there’s no one knowledgeable enough to walk you through them step by step.
The challenge of “marrying up” is no different — there are secrets to it.
Let’s talk about this tonight.
Honestly speaking, people today are both smarter and more pragmatic. Who wouldn’t want a lifelong partner who is reliable, capable, and has real prospects?
So I genuinely understand those readers — men and women alike — who hope to achieve a leap in life through a good marriage.
If you’re a working professional living off a salary, today’s message is one you absolutely need to read carefully.
Because these are words your boss would never say to you. Only your noble benefactor (Gui Ren) would be willing to offer you this kind of counsel — provided, of course, that you’re fortunate enough to encounter one at that level.
Let me start with this: over the years, my personal circle of friends has almost no one left who still works a regular job.
One of the foundational skills for product managers — one of the three core roles in the internet industry — is called “competitive analysis.” The idea is straightforward: study your competitors, track how their products evolve and change, and extract general industry patterns and lessons to learn from their strengths while compensating for your own weaknesses.
To me, this is a textbook example of work where form trumps value.
The product managers who write competitive analyses tend to cluster in the junior-to-mid range. Senior PMs, interestingly, rarely bother — probably because they’ve figured out it’s not particularly useful.
Once, you believed happiness meant earning big money, driving luxury cars, living in a gleaming high-floor apartment adorned with fine things — surrounded by vast assets and profits flowing endlessly your way.
Then one day, you fell asleep and had a dream.
In the dream, you returned to your younger years — back to that small, familiar home, seeing your parents as they were then, still in the prime of their lives. You tasted again that flavor only your childhood kitchen could produce.
The most anxiety-inducing thing about a career is that most of the experience you accumulate consists of conclusions — you rarely understand why things work the way they do, or what factors actually drive the results.
This is because at work, you’re typically responsible for just one piece of the puzzle. You’re not part of the decision-making process, so you can’t see the full picture from where you stand, and you don’t have the access to gather the broader information that would make sense of it all.
Entrepreneurship and employment are two completely different paths:
Entrepreneurs are driven by demand; employees are driven by tasks. Entrepreneurs solve problems in an open-ended environment; employees solve problems within a constrained one. Entrepreneurs face the real market; employees face a false market (the virtual environment constructed by the platform they operate within). Entrepreneurs continuously experiment and embrace failure; employees avoid making mistakes. Entrepreneurs take on responsibility; employees evade it.
The truth is, most content about work that circulates online is wrong. The more you consume it, the more damage it does. Yet this kind of counter-consumerist message will always lose out — bad money drives out good.
Let me give you an example.
If someone is constantly being manipulated by their boss and pushed around by senior colleagues, what should they do?
The correct answer is: get out of that environment as soon as possible.
On a Sunday evening, at the invitation of a high-end jewelry brand, I was asked to speak to their core clientele about Chinese learning and traditional culture.
Honestly, in this day and age, talking about broad, sweeping Chinese cultural topics is entirely pointless. Anyone with even modest education can casually quote Taoist texts or Buddhist sutras.
And in circles where people have built real wealth, nobody wants to hear vague abstractions. What everyone values comes down to four simple words: real and practical.
Today’s lesson:
Step One: Patiently wait for the emergence of a global or regional financial or economic crisis. These crises occur on a recurring basis.
Step Two: During the crisis, use news and other resources to observe how the situation unfolds. When prices of quality assets drop sharply, deploy various loans and leverage tools to purchase these undervalued core assets. At the same time, anticipate that central banks and governments will likely respond with interest rate cuts and large-scale monetary easing.